


settle our bones like wood

by thisstableground



Series: less than ninety degrees [27]
Category: Do No Harm (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Moving In Together, Multi, SO DOMESTIC SO FLUFF
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:08:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23335906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Usnavi and Vanessa and Ruben, setting up their new apartment. Together. They are living in ittogether. They will probably continue to be pleasantly surprised about this for at least three more months.
Relationships: Ruben Marcado/Usnavi (In the Heights)/Vanessa (In the Heights)
Series: less than ninety degrees [27]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/713601
Comments: 20
Kudos: 21





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hey lads is it normal to love your own fic universe so much that you cry a lil about it when they finally all move in together

“I can’t believe I’ve only been home two days and you’re making me help you _move_ ,” Nina says.

“I can’t believe Usnavi made you breakfast and you’re still complaining,” Vanessa says.

“Usnavi giving me half his peanut butter toast does not count as making breakfast.” Nina yawns. “Why are we here so early? You made us all get up and come here at 7am and all that’s happened so far is Sonny and Benny fighting over cereal.”

“He was hoggin’ it!” Sonny objects.

“A man needs his fuel, Sonny,” Benny says, spinning the key of the rental van around his index finger.

“You’re here early because we’re movin’ three people’s worth of stuff in one day,” Usnavi says, nobly ignoring Nina’s attack on his hosting skills. “Most of mine was still in boxes from before anyway, so we’re gonna take that to the new place first and I’ll grab the keys, so someone can come with to help me unpack while Benny comes back to get Vanessa’s shit, and someone can go with Ruben in the car to help him.”

“Dibs on Ruben,” Sonny says immediately.

“What? Really?” Ruben says.

“Yeah!”

Ruben shrugs to himself. “We might as well get started now, then, unless we have any more cereal feuds to settle.”

“I’m bueno.”Sonny points at Benny. “ _You’re_ on thin fuckin’ ice.”

“I’m terrified,” Benny says, placidly.

“Have fun, babe,” Vanessa says to Ruben, fluttering her fingers at him in a lazy wave. “See you at the apartment later.”

“At _our_ apartment later,” Usnavi corrects her, big big smile.

***

They’re barely in the car and already it’s The Morning Apology Hour with Dr. Ruben Marcado. Sonny makes exasperated eye contact with his own reflection in the wing mirror as Ruben asks for the third time if he’s _sure_ he doesn’t want to go with Usnavi – “I’ve already packed up most of my stuff, I don't have a lot, it’s really just the plants, so I don’t need that much help anyw-“

“Can it with the lone wolf routine, doc, I _offered_ to come. Usnavi’s every kind of disaster and Vanessa’s probably already hollering at the furniture, you’re the only one with any chill.”

Ruben pauses in mildly affronted confusion halfway through buckling his seatbelt, as if perhaps nobody has ever accused him of having chill before. They don’t talk on the way back up to Washington Heights but Sonny’s fine with that – he’s as chatty as any other De la Vega when he wants, but he doesn’t have a pathological need to fill every second of silence like _certain_ relatives of his, and he likes to think that him and Ruben know each other well enough that this one could be called comfortable.

At Ruben’s apartment, in a corner of the kitchen, there’s two boxes of books, two trash bags full of clothes, and a suitcase. There’s also a stack of flattened-down cardboard boxes leaning against the wall beside them, which Ruben takes and sets on the table next to a big stack of newspaper, a roll of packing tape, and an assortment of flora in brightly-colored pots.

“Is that all you had to pack?” Sonny says, surprised.

“Yes? Other than the –“

“The plants, yeah. Wow, you weren’t kidding when you said you don’t have a lot.”

“Nope. And most of what I do have is sweaters, to be honest.” Ruben scratches along the circle of the packing tape roll, looking for the end. “I only had the suitcase when I moved here. Ma could only keep so much when I was dead, and – what?”

Sonny quickly takes whatever expression is on his face off of it. “It...ain’t every day people say things like _when I was dead_ so casually.”

“Oh.” Ruben peels up the end of the packing tape and sticks it to the edge of the table, looking embarrassed. “Usnavi and Vanessa are used to it, I forget. Sorry.”

“Está bien.” Sonny takes one of the flattened pieces of card and reconstructs it to its 3-dimension boxy glory. “I never really think about all that stuff that musta happened before you came here, it trips me out when I remember it.”

“You must think about it some. You’re careful about the nicknames now.”

Like that’s all that hard. Something Sonny appreciates about Ruben is that, even though it might take some coaxing to get information out of him, he’s straightforward with it once you do. _He used to call me Rubes. I don’t like it_. Easy enough to adapt to that. “Well, yeah, but like, that’s just how it is with anyone. Like how I don’t ask Usnavi about the holidays and I don’t ask Vanessa about her folks but that don’t mean I’m always _thinking_ about it. There’s a bunch of shit I don’t do around you, but I don’t actually think about the _why_ every time, it’s just how I talk when I’m with you.”

“Huh,” Ruben says. “That’s...really nice to know, actually.”

Sonny shrugs, _de nada._ “And even when I do think about it I’m mostly just thinking _holy shit that’s real fucked up_ and not so much about what they do with all your junk when you’re dead.”

“It’s _hugely_ inconvenient. They cancelled all my credit cards.”

“Do they write off your student loans if you only die for a couple months?”

“I...oh, that’s a good question. They haven’t called me since I got back.” Ruben looks a little hunted by this revelation. “I didn’t think to tell them I was still alive and all my contact details changed. That's gonna bite me in the ass, isn't it?”

“All I’m hearing right now is _yes, Sonny, I found the loophole, let me help you fake your death in four years once you graduate.”_

“If you need someone to chase you to another country and tell everyone he killed you, I know a guy.”

“Does he charge?”

“More than you can imagine,” Ruben says, with a snort of bizarrely genuine laughter. Is it fucked up that they’re joking about it? About _him?_ Making jokes almost makes it seem normal, which it definitely isn’t. On the other hand, this is part of Ruben’s normal, and they can’t spend their whole lives awkward about it.

“Sucks, though. About your things.”

“I didn’t mind,” Ruben says. “I mean, I mind the situation but once I was here I didn’t feel the need to replace most of it. Turns out I didn’t really need any of it in the first place.”

“Except your personal rainforest.”

“Except that.” Ruben gives him a small smile, gently pets the fronds of a dark-leafed trailing plant in front of him. “Everyone needs something to take care of.”

“And now you got a whole boyfriend and girlfriend to take care of,” Sonny muses, picking up one of the succulents. “Does that mean I can have your plants? I miss these lil guys, we really bonded while you were in California. And they're less trouble than Usnavi."

Ruben does a grimace of genuine pain. “That’s like asking if you can take my _children_.”

“Think of it as long term babysitting,” Sonny says, cradling the heavy pot like a newborn. “If they’re living with Usnavi that means they’re familia now, you gotta let them spend quality time with their new cousin.”

The hilarious face journey that Ruben is immediately transported on tells Sonny that he definitely picked up on the underlying meaning. Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Ruben’s going to be _moving in_ with _Usnavi_ today, and Sonny’s not like Vanessa where letting people know he holds any kind of affection for them will immediately make his arteries shut down in protest. But it’s sort of sad too, somehow, so Sonny gives Ruben a reprieve by finally putting down the succulent and handing him the stack of old newspapers. They’re here for a reason, after all. “I think we could probably have this done by lunchtime if we go quick.”

Ruben starts to wrap the ceramic pot of the traily plant in protective newspaper, very much like he is re-diapering a baby. “If we _don’t_ go quick then everyone else will have already carried all the heavy stuff upstairs before we get there,” he points out.

“A man after mi own corazón,” Sonny says. “I knew I liked you, Marcado.”

**

Vanessa is in a wrestling match with her coffee table when Benny lets himself back in after dropping Usnavi and Nina up at the new place, dragging it along the floor where the rug gets bunched up under it and halts her progress.

“Need a hand?” he asks.

“No,” she scowls, pulling it towards herself so hard she stubs her toe on it when it suddenly dislodges. “Ow, _fuck_ this jank-ass piece of shit.”

“Alright, tough girl,” Benny says, tapping her shoulder and bumping her out the way. “Don’t give yourself a hernia, you don’t gotta prove nothing to the table.”

“I got it up here by myself when I bought it,” she huffs, wiping her brow.

“Hold up on taking that downstairs, anyhow, we wanna pack the biggest stuff first. Any other furniture coming with?”

“Not the couch, that’s busted, but we’re gonna put my bed in the spare room, and we need the table and chairs and my dresser. And the bedside table. All of it, basically. I’m the only one with furniture.”

“Then we’re probably best packing the bed up first.” Benny hefts the mattress up so they can start dismantling the bedframe underneath; Vanessa comes to help him prop it up vertical against the wall. “Whew. So. Hamilton Heights, huh? Whose idea was that?”

“Compromise. Usnavi’s the one who found the apartment.”

“He’s over the goddamn moon,” Benny says. Usnavi has barely talked to him about anything else for the past month, and most of what he says is so excited that it’s incomprehensible. “You realize he woulda moved in with you years ago if he’d thought you wanted it?”

“I know,” she says. “Didn’t want to then. Now I do.”

“So what changed? Was it really just Ruben?”

Vanessa gives him a smile like a curl of barbed wire, pointed and shining. “Yes, _just_ Ruben,” she says sarcastically. “I don’t gotta justify him to you.”

“Christ, where’d you get the idea I was asking you to? I’m curious, not an _asshole_.” Vanessa would shoot the sun out of the sky for Usnavi but they tend to understand each other on that point so Benny can be pretty damn blunt with her when they talk about him. She’s much less lenient when it comes to talking about Ruben. Which makes sense, he supposes. He hasn’t been Ruben’s friend for two decades, after all.

It’s a mark of how far his own friendship with Vanessa has come that after a long and piercing look, she takes him on his word. “You don’t know him like we do. If you did, you wouldn’t even have to ask.”

“It’s kinda hard to get to know him,” Benny points out. It’s not like he hasn’t tried. He _is_ trying. That’s _why_ he wants to know.

“Yeah, well, it ain’t like we started dating him and it made everything okay. He came here to start over but he can’t, not really,” she says, thumps a fist agitatedly into the mattress propped against the wall beside her. “Moving away from your past don’t just fix everything, turns out. And things that hurt that much can keep on making all your decisions for you forever if you let them. But _he_ doesn’t, else he wouldn’t even be dating us. He’s...powerful. It’s contagious.” She strides past Benny to yank open a drawer and pull out a screwdriver, and then she points it at him. “And _I_ ain’t the only one in this relationship who learned something from him on that count.”

“I know.”

“I think you’re just jealous because we’re takin’ your boy away.”

“Well, yeah,” Benny says, because obviously he is, was that ever in question? “You know he pines without me.”

“It’s like fifteen minutes on the 1,” she says. “I think you’ll both cope. Be grateful I didn’t drag him downtown or Queens or somewhere. Or to.... _Looong Iiiisland._ ”

She wiggles her fingers, ghostlike. Benny shudders. “Don’t even joke about that.”

“Don’t test me, then.” She turns the screwdriver round and passes it to him handle first, like taking mercy in a swordfight she just won. “Now can we quit blabbermouthing? We got furniture to haul.”

***

“Vanessa’s moving in with a boy,” Nina says, putting away cutlery in a drawer in Usnavi’s new kitchen. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

 _“Two_ boys!” Usnavi says. “Give the girl her credit.”

“Hope you know she’s a terrible roommate.”

“Mmhm,” Usnavi says, blithely disbelieving. “Got any tips for me?”

“I do, but I prefer to watch you struggle.”

In actual fact, Nina liked having Vanessa living with her. Vanessa had never been more than a couple buildings away Nina’s whole life until college. Even after three years, it’s still unsettling sometimes when she isn’t, a grouchy, itchy phantom limb. After she got the job offer in California, Nina had let herself just for a short while entertain the notion of Vanessa staying and the guys moving out there permanently, even though she’d been fairly sure it wouldn’t happen. But it would’ve been nice to have her two oldest friends living in the same neighborhood as her again.

(Plus Ruben. A chance to spend more time getting to know him would be nice. Even aside from the relationship with people she considers her family, Nina can’t help but feel something towards Ruben that isn't kinship but maybe the precursor to it, if they didn't live on opposite ends of the county. _Gifted kid woes_ , she thinks, though both of them are more than just that).

Oh well. Didn't pan out that way. This isn’t regret. She’s the one who chose to leave, the first time and the second. It’s what Abuela would’ve wanted. It’s what _Nina_ wanted. But she does miss having them nearby.

“Did you see they painted over the grate?” Usnavi says, timing so pinpoint with her own thoughts that she startles, but really it would be hard not to think of Abuela right now, when it’s just her and Usnavi reminiscing in the midst of the summer heat and a pile of boxes.

“Yeah,” Nina says. “But we don’t need it to remember her.”

Usnavi nods, smiles brightly at the mugs he puts them into the cupboard. Nina thinks of him on a December day years ago, shattering a cup against the wall and wailing in her arms. It’s more comforting than she can say that even the poster children for life kicking your dreams out from under your feet can look so contented with enough time.

“Man, what do you think she would say if she found out I didn’t leave the Heights to own a bar on the beach, I left to come live in a crazy bi love triangle,” he says, happily. Nina laughs. They both know Abuela was the first person Nina went to when she was 14 and confused and terrified of what her parents would say if they knew she maybe liked a _girl_. The first person _all_ of them went to.

She supposes, though, that even knowing that Abuela had nothing but love and support for Carla and Sonny and Nina coming out to her, Usnavi won’t actually get to know exactly what Abuela would say about it to him. It certainly caught Nina by surprise, when Vanessa first told her that she thought Usnavi might be into guys, and Nina likes to think she has a pretty good radar for it. But it’s very easy with Usnavi to get used to seeing him one way and never imagine him changing, even though he’s constantly proving them wrong on that point. She wonders if everyone else has noticed how much he’s grown over the past few years or if it’s only so clear to her because she spends so much time away: he isn’t second-guessing this move at _all_ , absolutely sure in the choice he’s made, even without Abuela’s guidance _._

She kisses him on the cheek and says, “she’d be so happy that you found your own way here.”

***

Usnavi stretches his aching arms out in the sudden quiet of the new apartment. Everyone else has been driven home by Benny after an exhausted but triumphant dinner, takeout sitting on the floor surrounded by more work to do, but the moving in part all finished so the rest of it is up to Usnavi and Vanessa and Ruben, whenever they get round to it.

And they’d toasted, of course, champagne from mismatched mugs and glasses while everything’s still in semi-packed chaos. Usnavi was drinking out of a measuring jug. He likes to think he made it look elegant against all odds.

“There’s still some left,” Vanessa says, shaking the nearly-empty champagne so that it sloshes. “Might as well finish it up.”

She takes a huge swig straight from the bottle.

“Classy lady, that’s what I love about you,” Usnavi says. He takes it from her hand and does a lazy little vaguely-merengue with her while he drinks: she dips him, and he tilts the bottle up so he doesn’t pour it all over himself, tilts his head back at the sound of footsteps, Ruben coming back from throwing all the takeout containers in the trash.

“Oh snap,” Usnavi says to Vanessa. “Don’t look now, but the hottest guy in the city just walked into our living room.”

Vanessa pulls Usnavi upright with a whistle. “You think we could talk him into a threeway? He looks easy.”

“Not today he isn’t,” Ruben says, letting Usnavi take his hand and spinning gently under one arm then continuing the path to go lie face down on the mattress that’s supposed to go on the spare room bed but is currently just hanging out in the middle of the living room floor. “Today he is sleepy.”

It’s not surprising. The move took all day even with all six of them, a long long day of hard work, but Usnavi’s used to hard work so even though somewhere his body is probably tired too, he isn’t feeling it yet. “Aw, you don't wanna celebrate our first night in style?”

“Is that what we’re calling fucking on a floor mattress now?” Ruben says, stretching his arms out over his head. “How about we wait till tomorrow, when our nice new bed arrives and my spine isn’t crumbling and we remember which box we packed the lube in?”

“He turns thirty in a couple weeks, we gotta start bein’ delicate with him else he might bust a hip,” Vanessa says, joining Ruben on the mattress. He sits up to greet her with a cheek nuzzle and a petulant nudge. “Hey, this ain’t half bad, come here and look at the view, Usnavi.”

“I’m lookin’,” Usnavi says, watching them framed in the dusk of the big windows that Vanessa had fallen in love with when they’d first looked around the place. Inside the glass the setting sunlight paints the floorboards pink; outside, just barely visible in the distance he can see the river. It’s a new kind of view, but it isn’t so far from what he knows. That’s his river, same as it was further up Manhattan. Vanessa in silhouette kisses Ruben on the cheek.

Usnavi comes to join them on the mattress, bottle of champagne still in his hand and he raises it in the air. “Welcome home,” he says.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They don’t share everything, even now, but what they do share is the world’s most enormous bed, and sometimes that's all you need.

In Usnavi’s old apartment is a Narnia of cleaning equipment and old ragged cardboard boxes sealed up with peeling duct tape and defunct 90s technology that he couldn’t bring himself to throw away, this dusty collection of which lives inside the narrow room with a long-since burnt out light that Usnavi calls “the storage closet”.

Ruben tumbles out of it in a clatter of mop handles and regret, clutching the box of spare batteries that Usnavi hadn’t been able to reach himself.

“Please don’t ask me to get you anything out of there again,” he says. “I was this close to having to battle myself in a Darth Vader costume.”

Usnavi picks a piece of cobweb out of Ruben’s hair and takes the batteries off him. “Yeah, you wanna try _sleeping_ in it.”

“Why would I do that?”

“This was my bedroom for like nineteen years,” Usnavi says, and misunderstanding Ruben’s confused look adds, “less mops in it back then, claro.”

Ruben catches himself just a breath before he says something wildly insensitive like “Usnavi, people shouldn’t sleep in _closets”_ or “how did you fit a bed in there?” or “there isn’t even a window, I don’t think that’s legal.” Usnavi’s parents, he’s pretty sure, wouldn’t have _chosen_ this as their kid’s bedroom in an ideal world, but the world isn’t ideal so sometimes there are no choices. At least Usnavi doesn’t seem to mind it.

“That explains why you ended up so small,” he says instead, and thinks, _nineteen years_ , and stores the many questions he has about that one extra year after the main bedroom became suddenly vacant in his brain ready to unpack if Usnavi brings it up again later, which Usnavi does not.

***

“I think there’s a mistake,” Vanessa says, observing the box that Ruben has managed, with difficulty, to shuffle into their new bedroom. “Did you accidentally order a baby mattress for babies?”

“It’s rolled up,” Ruben says. Sometimes it’s the smallest innovations that are the most fascinating, like an entire family king size mattress compressed into a very heavy but much smaller box. He opens the cardboard and cuts the seal on the vacuum-pack plastic to set it free, and they all watch in silent appreciation as it hits the air and slowly forms itself into shape like a flower blooming in timelapse. At capacity, it takes up most of the bedroom floor, disrupting the pile of metal and wooden slats there and nearly smothering Usnavi where he’s sitting crosslegged among them.

“I probably should’ve have taken it out _after_ we finished putting the bed together,” Ruben admits.

“And why am I the one doing that?” Usnavi wants to know, wriggling free and flapping a piece of paper while Vanessa and Ruben stand the mattress up on its side. “I can’t even understand the instructions!”

“You have them upside down.” Ruben kneels on the floor next to him, smooths the paper out flat on the floor and says, “see, you just have to take this piece and put it on—wait, no, sorry, _this_ piece...wait.”

He turns the instructions another 90 degrees, and fruitlessly shuffles some random pieces of metal that don’t seem to correspond to any of the diagrams around, while Usnavi gives him knowing looks.

“Well, I’m good at other things,” he mutters, putting the pieces back down sheepishly.

“I mean, I didn’t hate the floor mattress last night,” Usnavi says. “Maybe we’re a floor mattress house now?”

“We ain’t,” Vanessa says firmly. She crouches in between them, handing them things and positioning their hands. “You hold _this_ and you put _this_ there, and if I just – hold up – there,” and just like that they have the top section of a bedframe.

“She didn’t even look at the _instructions,”_ Usnavi whispers, awed.

“I put together all my own furniture in the studio,” she explains.

“Is there anything you can’t do?” Ruben asks her, as she tests the tightness of the bolts.

“Nope,” she says.

***

At random sometimes Ruben thinks about Usnavi’s closet room and what kind of child he was when he lived there. It’s hard to do the same for Vanessa. He knows enough about her home life to know why she stayed out as much as could, why she was so intensely caring of every inch of her studio apartment, why she doesn’t dabble around in nostalgia for her past. He doesn’t know what her home itself was like. What posters she put up on the walls, what color sheets she had, the ways she painted her borrowed, rented space with all the personality she has. Are there still decorations there now from when she was a kid? Is the bed still made up like she might return to visit someday, the way his own mother has kept a little space for him even after he moved out?

He doesn’t know if when she left she had time to make sure she’d packed everything she wanted to take with her or whether she left in a hurry, whether she left anything behind in the rush. If she felt like there was all that much to leave behind in the first place.

Only once, he asks what was her bedroom like as a kid, and she says she doesn’t know, it was just a room, why does it matter, and he says he supposes it doesn’t.

It does matter. But that doesn’t mean she has to tell him about it.

**

“We should probably start looking to buy a couch, too,” Ruben says.

“Why would we need a couch when we have all this space?” Usnavi says. He sticks his legs up in the air then brings them down on the vast mattress that they’re all testing out, now in place atop the fully-constructed bed and made up in fresh white sheets. “I’ll need to call a cab just to get over to your side, we could fit the whole barrio in here.”

“Yeah, but we’re not gonna,” Vanessa says. “Dios, you let a guy bring one stray into bed with you and he really starts getting ideas.”

“Well, look how well that worked out!” Usnavi stretches his arm out towards Ruben then drops it, clawing softly at Vanessa like he’s trying to drag himself out of quicksand. “Ugh. Too...far...can’t...reach!”

“I don’t want the whole barrio in our bed either,” Ruben says, mostly for the excuse of being able to say _our bed._ “Which is why we need to buy a couch.”

“We should decide how we want the living room to look first,” Vanessa says. “Then we can get something that fits the vibe, instead of something boring and generic like these sheets.”

“White sheets are _nice_ ,” Ruben says indignantly. He’s the one who bought them, and after a whole lot of thought he specifically got white because he didn’t want to make a decision on something interesting and have it be ugly and make a fool of himself. Specifically, you might say, because they are boring. But that doesn’t mean she has to _call him out._

“Spoke like a guy who loves a labcoat. Say that again when you’re the one who has to clean blood off them at least once a month, or when Usnavi spills his coffee for the millionth time.”

“You gotta take these things into account,” Usnavi agrees. He uses his elbows and hips to bounce himself upright and then straddles over Ruben’s lap. “Wanna mess ‘em up now and get it over with?” he asks, which yes, Ruben does.

***

Ruben slept on a beach and begged on the street for the first week after _it_ happened, or dozed during the day in the waiting room at the clinic once they’d checked and changed his bandages. He can’t remember if he’s told them about that part. It probably matters, but so do a lot of things.

**

It is around midnight that Ruben wakes up and for a brief moment is thoroughly convinced he’s going to die. Old news.

The apartment is still unfamiliar, that’s probably why, although since his record of consecutive uninterrupted nights tops out at an unimpressive five, there’s all sorts of reasons and often no reasons at all that this happens. But there are bad dreams and then there are bad dreams. The ones that mean that, without ever discussing it, Vanessa and Usnavi always make sure that Ruben can sleep on the side nearest the door so that there’s nothing to slow him down if he needs to throw up or sleep somewhere else or stay awake all night. Or there’s the ones like this, nothing more than a mildly annoying jolt, like the way Usnavi sometimes twitches aggressively in the shallower parts of his sleep. Ruben doesn’t even need to sit up to shake it off, just breathes it out and waits it out.

Usnavi, irrepressibly sleep twitchy, rolls over to crash clumsily into him.

“Hello,” Ruben murmurs, though Usnavi probably doesn’t hear. It’s just nice to have someone to say it to, to lie chest to chest and heartbeat to heartbeat with until the dream has faded and he’s halfway into a new and softer one when he feels Usnavi move out of his reach again. There’s a raspy murmur of laughter from Vanessa, who he hadn’t realized was awake. He makes a quizzical noise at her.

“So much for more personal space,” she whispers.

Ruben lifts his head again and laughs too: Usnavi is clinging around her like somebody took an octopus and threw it at a tree branch. Even while they watch him, he detaches from Vanessa and is halfway back to Ruben before Vanessa pins him in place with a hug and says, “stop that.”

“No,” Usnavi says, then adds, “mgfnffl Ruben?” and waves his hand around forlornly until Ruben gets the message and joins them.

“All this money on the world’s hugest bed,” Vanessa says, big-spooning aggressively against Usnavi’s back so he can’t escape and keep rolling around, “and it gives him separation anxiety.”

“I think it’s kind of sweet,” Ruben says.

“You think everything he does is sweet,” Vanessa says.

This is true. And though he isn't dumb enough to say it, it’s also true that he finds everything _she_ does sweet, including how she’s still spooning Usnavi but has left one of her legs splaying out on the empty side of the vast bed as if she’s making a point to make the most of it despite circumstances. Usnavi, trapped comfortably between them, wiggles with satisfaction. Ruben is nearest the door, just in case, but tonight he doesn’t need it. There are lots of other things besides that, but these are the ones that matter right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you're all prepared for like a thousand fics like this where they're just Soft in various different places in their new apartment
> 
> please leave a comment if you liked it!


End file.
